You can kiss a bride. You can shower a bride with convection ovens and air fryers, you can pelt her with rice, and now you can drink the bride’s branded brew.

That’s thanks to Eliqs, a DTC custom-labeled beverage company with the aim of personalizing America’s brewskis. Founded in 2019, the company (short for elixir, get it?) sprung from a graduate business-school thesis at UCLA and raised a $5.7 million seed round in August. Now the company is underway with a social ad push that began in September.

It’s targeting weddings, bachelor and bachelorette parties, basically any milestone worthy of a cold one, Eliqs’s co-founder Max Berg told Marketing Brew.

“How can we brand pretty much every product out there but can’t custom design your own beer?” Berg said. Or hard seltzer, canned wine, and sparkling or purified water, which Eliqs cans and ships nationwide.

Customers have two different options:

• They can customize a 12-pack using one of the company’s (Instagram-friendly) templates, adding text and photos to make it personal. These cost about $50.
• Or, they can take it a step further with a fully custom design that involves a questionnaire, beverage selections, and a note for the designer. These orders can range from 36 to more than 500 cans, with prices starting at around $2.15 per can (plus a $95 design fee).

To sell and ship the hooch, Eliqs is licensed as a brewery and a winery, but the drinks come from other breweries or wineries. For Berg, what’s on the outside is the selling point. But the drinks have to be good enough for people to come back for more.

“If someone tries our beverages and it tastes like shit, they’re not going to buy from us again and they’re not going to recommend us to other people,”  Berg said.

We talked to Berg about the brand’s different revenue streams, its recent ad push, and his broader vision for Eliqs. Keep reading here.—RB

In the Netflix original film Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, Craig is haunted by cryptic text messages being sent from beyond the grave. To promote the coming-of-age horror movie ahead of its release, why not give would-be viewers a taste of that same feeling?

Rewind: Netflix and the agency David Miami decided to do just that in Times Square in New York and on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

• In the first week of October, some passersby, in view of Netflix billboards sporting cryptic text-message bubbles, received sudden AirDrop requests on their iPhones.
• Those AirDrop requests contained an image of the billboard, urging the recipients to look at the text messages more closely.
• Adding to the mystery, the requests were labeled as being sent from Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the fictional location where the eponymous Mr. Harrigan (and his iPhone) is laid to rest in the film.

Message received: Using AirDrop is certainly one way to cut through to consumers faced with seemingly endless pieces of content and advertising.

“The billboard was already the main part of the idea of seeing these enigmatic messages, and we know the best way to multiply that effect is to put the billboard onto their phones,” said Ander Perez, an associate copywriter at David Miami who worked on the campaign. “We wanted to give people more and more hints to figure out what we were trying to say.”

Whether or not users accepted the requests didn’t matter much to the agency; just pushing people to look down at their phones was enough to do the trick. (If you were wondering, just over 200 people actually accepted the AirDrop file-transfer request.)

Read more about the campaign, as well as other promotion tactics used for the series, here.—KS

I was so tired of building long-winded decks. Every time our agency brought in a new client, we’d construct these laughably verbose social strategy presentations, easily eclipsing 50 slides on the short end. We’d force every minuscule detail into PowerPoints that’d creak from the final file size. Worse, I knew the clients never read them—execs run right past strategy and just wanna see pretty content. That’s why I started sending the decks via trackable bitly links. Shout out to that client that didn’t even open the $30,000 strategy deck I’d spent probably 80 hours building.

Social strategy should be simple. How we communicate social strategy should be simple.

You really just need to answer four questions:

• What are you trying to accomplish?
• Who are you trying to reach?
• What resources do you have?
• How will you measure success?

I break ’em down one by one here.—JA

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Looking back: How five brands hopped on some of 2022’s biggest trends.

Groundhog Day: For recurring events, perfect your SEO strategy with these tips.

Food for thought: Tweet editing hasn’t resulted in a big jump in Twitter Blue subscribers, data suggests.

TTYL, IG: Execs at DTC brands used to focus influencer budgets on Instagram—but those days are in the rearview. Marketing Brew asked industry leaders about their new spending strategies. Sponsored by Black Crow AI.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Curious to know why GoPro would bring 40 creators to Switzerland? The Brew’s Jack Appleby is serving up the inside scoop on this year’s GoPro Creator Summit. Sitting down with Kelly Baker, senior director of community marketing, Jack gets to know the impact and undertaking of such an event, and how the GoPro team throws this best-in-class influencer activation.

It’s all going down on October 27. We hope to see you there!

• Kanye West has agreed to purchase Parler, the conservative social media network.
• Meta’s primary metaverse play, Horizon Worlds, doesn’t see most visitors return after their first month, per internal documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.
• Walgreens intends to use marketing to win back customers it has lost during the pandemic.
• Fox Corp. and News Corp could embrace cuffing season and get back together…If Rupert Murdoch’s proposed merger goes as planned, that is.
• Google changed how it presents mobile search results, opting for a “Sponsored” tag rather than an “Ad” one.

Snap poll: Netflix’s ad-supported tier is near. Will you…

🟢 Sign up for Netflix for the first time now that there’s an ad-supported version
🟡 Switch your existing Netflix account to the ad-supported version
Keep your ad-free version

A 1963 Standard Oil Company of California ad, because nothing says Halloween like…oil.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Why streamers see Halloween as a great time to win over new subscribers
• Kim Kardashian SEC charges have influencer marketers on edge
• Inside women’s healthcare org Tia’s first influencer marketing campaign